Should've Taken Those Game Rights
by jakxkeiraaddict
Summary: Daxter stumbles across something that he and Jak never thought they'd see... A game about their adventures, starring themselves. However, they're about to find out that letting someone take control of their lives isn't all it's cracked up to be... Oneshot


**Disclaimer: I do not own Jak and Daxter, or any of its related characters and concepts. Do I wish I did? Heck yeah! Do I? No.**

**JKA: So this is another attempt at humor by yours truly, since my first one got more positive feedback than I could have hoped. ^_^ Basically, I needed a way to vent how much I HATED the newest Jak game, not to mention titles or anything... *cough-LostFrontier-cough* And thus, this story was born. Keep in mind that this wasn't meant to be taken seriously, it was all written in fun. And with that in mind, read, review, and enjoy.**

**P.S. This is also a (late) birthday present for my fellow author and fantasy-world sister Fire-Eco-Sage. Happy belated b-day, FES! Hope you find this to your liking. :)**

**P.P.S. This is set where everything from TPL through Jak X has actually happened, and TLF is just a game someone made inspired by Jak and Daxter's life.**

* * *

A streak of orange pelted down the deserted hallway, skidding to a halt outside the solitary bedroom nestled into one side. He flung the door open without hesitating; sending it crashing into the wall behind it was an earth-shattering _bang_.

"Jak! Jak, guess what!" the pants-clad ottsel yelled loudly, peering into the soft darkness of his friend's room, his small form illuminated in the light cast by the hall.

Silence was all that greeted his words; that is until it was rather abruptly shattered by a rumbling snore.

"For the love of Mar…" Daxter sighed, bounding into the room and hopping up onto the end table situated beside the bed. He flicked on the bedside lamp in the center of the nightstand, revealing the sleeping form of his best friend and everyone's favorite hero. Jak's green/blonde hair was ruffled and wild, and a trickle of drool had dried to an unappealing crust on one side of his face.

The Eco-infused elf groaned as the beam from his lamp burned his closed eyes, and he rolled over onto his opposite side, slinging one arm groggily over his head.

"Go 'way, Dax," he mumbled sleepily, dragging the covers up over his long ear in hopes that the rodent would get discouraged and allow him a few more hours' rest.

"Come on, Jakky-boy, you gotta see this!" Daxter insisted, scampering around his closest friend and bouncing up and down beside his head.

Jak cracked open one eye reluctantly, fixing his animal sidekick with an annoyed glare.

"This had better be something _really_ important," he grumbled, pausing as a gaping yawn escaped his throat. "Otherwise I'm putting your pants through a shredder for waking me up so early."

"Hey, leave the pants alone!" Daxter retorted, placing his hands on his hips defiantly. "I waited three, count 'em, _three_ adventures for these beauties, and I ain't about to give 'em up! And speaking of adventures, that's what I wanted to talk to you about…"

"I'm listening," Jak pressed, in no mood to be patient — not that he was ever patient to begin with, but the fact that he'd only slept about two hours the previous night after blowing up Metal Heads in the sewers all day certainly wasn't helping.

"Ok, you're not gonna believe this, but…" Daxter paused dramatically, puffing out his chest. "Someone made a game about us!"

"_What_?" Jak demanded, fully alert for the first time since his companion's obnoxious entrance. He sat bolt upright, the blankets falling away to reveal his bare chest, arching one eyebrow disbelievingly.

"You heard me!" his furry pal affirmed, the flaps on his goggles bouncing against his neck as he nodded vigorously. "I was perusing the video store, minding my own business, and then _wham_! Our faces, right smack in the middle of the shelf!"

As if to prove his point, Daxter reached into his pocket and pulled out what could only be a shiny new video game, waving it madly in front of Jak's face.

"Wait a minute," Jak stammered, confusion flashing across his visage for a brief instant. "How the hell did you fit an entire game in your pocket?" He examined Daxter's ottsel-sized pants swiftly, seeing no possible solution as to how the object that was nearly half Daxter's size could squeeze into one of the compartments.

"Heh heh… That's for me to know and for you to never find out," the orange rat replied evasively. "But that's not the point! The point is: _we're in a freaking video game_!" He shoved the game in question under Jak's nose as if to emphasize his declaration.

Quick as lightning, Jak snatched the electronic case out of Daxter's hands and examined it more closely, ignoring the indignant protest from his partner-in-crime.

Sure enough, the front cover of the game was dominated by a picture of Jak himself, his features a mask of fierce determination, while a slightly cocky Daxter resided ever-faithfully on his shoulder. The background consisted of mainly what resembled churning storm clouds, and beneath that, a strange-looking plane soared over a waterfall that appeared to fall into an endless abyss of white.

Across the top in large, flame-colored lettering read Jak and Daxter's own names, followed by a more sophisticatedly printed subtitle.

"Pretty slick, eh, buddy?" Daxter mused excitedly, having clambered up onto his usual perch atop Jak's currently unarmored appendage in order to inspect the game for himself.

"It's not bad," Jak conceded, his interest waning when he noted that his two-dimensional counterpart didn't seem to be wielding a weapon of any sort. As far as he was concerned, even a game about himself wasn't worth playing without the ability to blow anything and everything up with the touch of a button.

"Come on, big guy, I can't give this bad boy a test run without my costar there as a witness!" Daxter pleaded, hopping down onto Jak's lap and mimicking the pose his reflective portrait was striking.

For a moment it appeared as if Jak were about to argue, and then he sighed in defeat, knowing that Daxter would just keep begging him until either he gave in, or he snapped and his demonic alter ego ate the persistent rodent.

"Fine, Dax," the dark warrior surrendered, rolling his eyes as Daxter broke out into a victory dance.

"First one there gets first dibs!" he yelled, whipping around and bounding to the end of Jak's mattress, game still tightly in hand.

Just as he was about to jump down to the ground, however, Jak's own enthusiasm began to break loose despite himself, and he leapt to his feet, sending Daxter careening to the floor in a tangle of blankets and flailing limbs.

Shaking his head in exasperation, Jak strode around to the opposite side of his bed, bending down and picking up the plastic disk case from where it had fallen after Daxter's less-than-graceful dismount. Smirking to himself, Jak spun on his heel and raced out of his room, pausing only long enough to don the nearest decent-smelling shirt he could find.

Several seconds after the blonde-haired hero had disappeared, Daxter finally managed to disentangle himself from the mess of sheets, holding his head gingerly in an effort to stop the walls from spinning. He realized a moment later that the game was no longer in his grasp, and he glanced around frantically for it, only to discover that Jak had stolen it when the sounds of the video console starting up in the living room echoed down the hallway.

"Oh, sure, save the game," Daxter grumbled, storming irritably after his friend. "It's not like a certain half-Dark, half-Light arse gave me a concussion or anything. No, as long as the _game's_ safe, everything's all fine and dandy…"

* * *

Jak flopped down on the battered couch in the front room, controller in his lap while he waited for the title screen to load. Low muttering reached his sensitive ears from the general direction of the hall, and a moment later Daxter appeared, his normally cheerful expression shadowed in a scowl.

"Gee, thanks for helping me out back there, _pal_," the irked fur ball snapped, sticking his tongue out at his lounging companion. "I really —" He broke off abruptly as his gaze zeroed in on the object resting on Jak's thigh, his fingers curling into fists at his sides. "_Hey_! I wanted the orange controller!"

"You said that the first one here gets first crack," Jak reminded him, snickering at Daxter's enraged expression. "Besides, it's a one-person game anyway, and you can't even reach all the buttons."

"You're just jealous because I'm a far superior player than you," Daxter retorted, scampering up onto the arm of the sofa.

_"Sure_ you are,_"_ Jak snorted, running a hand through his messy green-tinted hair absentmindedly. "Remind me again who holds the high score on the arcade game down at the 'Ottsel?"

"Just shut up and start the game," Daxter snapped, leaning against the back of the couch and folding his arms over his chest crossly.

Rolling his eyes good-naturedly, Jak returned his attention to the TV screen, noting immediately that the disk's graphics seemed to be severely lacking. With the practiced ease engrained into any game-player's mind, he chose the "new game" option and proceeded to sit back and wait for the opening cut-scene.

After a moment of blackness, the picture faded in to what appeared to be a mass of gray storm clouds. Hardly a second later, the same oddly-shaped plane from the electronic device's cover zoomed into view, accompanied by dramatic music and a foggy jet stream trailing behind.

The camera angle swiftly changed to the cockpit of the aircraft, and both Jak and Daxter gasped at the sight before them.

"What the hell?" Jak demanded of no one in particular, staring at his computerized counterpart as if it were the most horrific thing he'd ever seen — and he'd seen some pretty screwy things.

"Is that supposed to be… _us_?" Daxter squeaked incredulously, his jaw hitting his fabric perch with an audible _thump_.

"I really, _really_ hope not…" Jak replied uncertainly, squeezing his eyes shut and praying that when he opened them again, the vomit-inducing image would have changed to something that even partially resembled him.

To say he was disappointed when he finally returned his attention to the screen would be the understatement of the century.

What was supposed to be a digital copy of Jak might as well have set the elf's rugged good-looks on fire and then danced on the ashes. One of the biggest alterations was the fact that the less-than-admirable graphics made Jak's face entirely too round, and there was absolutely no green present in his hair at all. The notches at the tips of his ears — a trait that Jak had always secretly taken pride in because of its uniqueness — were also absent, as was his tuft of a goatee.

The flesh-and-blood Jak brushed his fingers along his chin to double-check that aforementioned facial hair was still there, and he heaved a sigh of relief when he felt the familiar bristles on his skin.

Daxter's two-dimensional "twin" wasn't much more accurate. The ottsel's eyes were about ten times too large to fit his face, and his yellow-orange fur stood on end as if someone had recently electrocuted him.

"Look what they did to my beautiful pelt!" the real Daxter cried desperately, anxiously smoothing his fur as if he were suddenly self-conscious about it. "Do they have any idea how much of an effort I make to keep it as silky-smooth as it is? Precursors, I look like a freaking poodle!"

Before Jak had the chance to respond to that comment, the sound of the front door creaking interrupted him. A moment later, Keira strolled into the room, her lips curved upwards in a warm smile.

"Hi, guys" she greeted cheerfully, automatically taking a seat beside Jak. Neither of the males in the room thought this an odd occurrence, as Keira had practically lived at their apartment after their return from Kras City a few months previously.

"Hey, Keira," Jak answered monotonously, still attempting to get over the shock of the painful digital murdering of his looks. Daxter was still too preoccupied with making sure his fur was perfectly flattened to respond.

"What are you playing?" Keira asked curiously, noticing the controller that Jak held between his palms and the cut-scene currently rolling on the TV.

"A game… about us," Jak informed her, snapping out of his daze and realizing that they'd missed about half of the opening sequence due to the fact they were trying not to gag at their counterparts' appearances.

"Someone made a _game_ about you two?" the young mechanic repeated excitedly, paying closer attention to the clip. Her enthusiasm dropped slightly as she took note of her two childhood friends' computerized copies, and the obvious destruction of said friends' features. "Oh, well… They did a, um, good job portraying you…"

Both Jak and Daxter glanced at her sharply as if she'd slapped them.

Keira opened her mouth to rephrase her remark, when a third figure on the screen caught her attention, one that looked strangely like…

"Wait a second, is that _me_?" she yelped, her hand flying to her mouth in pure disbelief.

Sure enough, a she-elf that semi-resembled Keira was seated beside animated Jak in the foreign plane. All three companions watching the scene, however, hoped fervently that it was actually some random woman they'd never met before, because to say that the two-dimensional girl looked like Keira would be anything but a compliment.

The most obvious difference between the real and electronic Keira would be the fact that the latter had solidly blue hair that was several shades darker than the former's. On top of that, her trademark tank top and suspenders had been traded in for a less-than-attractive navy jacket and amethyst jeans tucked into knee-high boots.

"Sweet Mar, and I thought _we_ looked bad!" Daxter exclaimed, finally satisfied that his fur was not as frizzy as it appeared on his counterpart. "No offense, Keir, but that outfit makes you look big in all the wrong places."

"You wanna repeat that?" Jak hissed, fixing his partner-in-crime with a glare that had the power to make the most hardened of enemies piss themselves in fear.

"What the _hell_?" Keira yelled, cutting off whatever Daxter had been about to say and causing both of her friends to jump about five feet in the air. "I look like I'm effing _thirty_!"

"At least you don't look like a complete dumb-ass," Jak muttered irritably, scowling at the poorly-rendered image of himself.

"You know, it'd probably be a good idea to actually listen to what they're saying," Daxter commented, reminding the elfin duo that the movie sequence was still running.

Nodding in acknowledgement, the three of them lapsed into silence, attempting to catch up with what they'd missed in the storyline. At that moment, computerized Jak seemed to be wrestling with an unfamiliar man on the wing of the aircraft. During a break in the fight, however, the opponent threw a warm smile in digital Keira's direction.

"On the contrary, it seems I have stumbled across the world's most beautiful treasure," the unknown elf said in a suave voice, causing electronic Keira to tuck a strand of dull indigo hair behind her ear as if she were flattered.

A low growl slid between flesh-and-blood Jak's teeth, and Dark Eco began to crackle menacingly over his skin. Despite the fact that this man was obviously all pixels and geometric shapes, the idea that _anyone_ would try to make a move on Keira — apart from Daxter, of course — sent waves of jealously searing through his veins.

"Uh… maybe we'd better skip the rest of the clip…" Daxter suggested, pressing the button that would end the cut-scene before Jak had the chance to go off on a territorial rampage.

* * *

Sometime later, the gang had surprisingly managed to make it about a quarter of the way through the game, in the meantime racking up a list of complaints that just seemed to get longer and longer as they progressed.

Jak's biggest issue was that due to a so-called "Eco shortage" in the fantasy world, he had been robbed of his Dark and Light abilities. Not to mention all of his favorite toys had been downgraded severely, and his zoomer, Jetboard, and Peacemaker were completely nonexistent. And to add insult to injury, while Daxter and Keira's voices sounded remarkably close to the original, his character could have been played by a woman and it wouldn't have sounded any less masculine.

Daxter, on the other hand, was down-right outraged by how the game's writers had conveyed his sense of humor. He claimed that the lines that were spewing out of his digital twin's mouth lacked his unique brand of sarcasm, and on more than one occasion he threatened to march down to the headquarters of whatever company made the game and demand a rewrite.

Keira had the least amount of concerns when it came to her character, seeing as how she didn't play quite as big of a role as the other two. She even liked the fact that her counterpart could control the powers of the different Ecos, although she had to admit some of the things the computerized she-elf said knocked her copy's IQ down almost laughably lower than her own.

"Hey, did either of you notice that no one besides us is in this game at all?" Keira pondered aloud as she watched Jak blow cardboard dummies to smithereens with what she assumed was supposed to be a cheap version of the Blaster. "I mean, there's no Onin and Pecker, no Tess…"

"No Ashelin," Jak added, earning himself a punch in the arm from Keira that in turn caused the death of an innocent civilian target. He shot the sapphire-haired mechanic an annoyed glare while still keeping one eye on the screen so as not to lower his shooting range score any further. "I _wasn't done_. Sig's not there, either."

"And what about Tattooed Wonder? Or ole Log-In-The-Head?" Daxter agreed, always one to throw in his two-cents. "You can't make a game about _our lives_ without those two! They're some of our most important allies!"

The two elves on the couch stared at him blankly, Jak's lack of focus on the controller in his hands causing his cybernetic duplicate to run straight off a cliff.

"Ok… who are you and what have you done with Daxter?" Keira asked bluntly, blinking at the pants-clad ottsel in complete mystification.

Daxter was about to question why his childhood friends were looking at him as if he'd just transformed into a six-headed crocadog when a voice remarkably close to his own caught his attention.

"Ahh! Jimmy-nut-bar!" two-dimensional Daxter cried as some dark, blotchy purple substance poured out of what appeared to be a sewer pipe, splattering all over him.

"Damn it, how many more times can they possibly make me sound like a ten-year-old?" the living Orange Lightning growled, baring his teeth at the television in a very animalistic fashion.

"Hold on, what's happening to him?" Keira cut in before Daxter had the chance to go off on a rage-fueled rant. She gestured to the still-rolling movie sequence, where computer Daxter had disappeared in a brilliant, awfully-rendered flash of violet light. A moment later, some sort of ebony-eyed, long-clawed demon-rodent stood in his place, snickering venomously to itself.

If there had ever been a more punctuated silence between three people in history… no, there had _never_ been a more punctuated silence than the one the trio of companions had fallen into now.

Finally, after the clip had ended and the strange mutant rat had been standing in the same spot for several minutes, the three shell-shocked elves — or rather, two and a half — seemed to regain the ability to speak in the same instant.

"What... the… HELL?" they yelled in perfect unison, gazing open-mouthed at the oversized creature.

"Oh, sure, _I _can't have my Dark powers, that would just be too much to ask for," Jak scoffed bitingly, throwing the console controller down on the couch in frustration. "Dark _Daxter_, on the other hand, is perfectly sane! What were these people _smoking_ when they made this game?"

"You probably don't even want to know," Keira sighed, picking up the discarded remote seeing as how Jak probably wouldn't be touching it again any time soon.

"Well, _I_ like it," Daxter announced, grinning as Keira attempted to learn the controls of this new fuzzy Eco Demon. "If I was shock-full of Dark Eco in real life, I'd finally be able to teach Jakky-boy over here a lesson whenever he decided to piss me off."

Jak glanced from the fantasy world, to Daxter, — who was currently crouched as if he were a Dark monster preparing to tear an innocent bystander to shreds — and back again, his dark green eyebrows furrowing in a scowl.

"I hate this game…" he grumbled to himself, leaning back against the sofa and folding his arms moodily over his chest.

* * *

Nearly two hours later, and Keira had managed to plow through about half of the adventure. Jak had continued to sulk ever since animated Daxter had gained his alter-ego, and the fact that the character's flesh-and-blood version was quick to reenact any and all Dark Daxter fights did nothing to help his sour attitude.

Currently, the computerized gang was aboard a giant airborne ship that belonged to the game's main enemies, known as "Eco Pirates". The blonde-haired hero was being restrained by two burly-looking men while an elf that was no doubt the captain of the vessel appeared in front of him, Keira's pixel copy a step behind.

"Phoenix, don't!" the teenager-trapped-in-the-body-of-a-thirty-year-old cried, her flat emerald eyes locked on Jak.

"Phoenix?" digital Jak repeated incredulously. "You're on a first-name-basis now?"

At that comment, the real Keira slapped her palm to her forehead in exasperation, while Daxter simply rolled his eyes, adding it to the end of his ever-increasing mental list of cheesy lines from this game.

Jak, on the other hand, had a completely different reaction to his counterpart's words than either of his friends.

With a sudden roar, the dark warrior leapt to his feet and hunched over, ominous purple lightning crackling over his body as his skin paled to an ashen gray. It appeared that his infamous temper had finally reached its breaking point.

Within seconds, the terrifying form of Jak's gruesome Dark side stood in the middle of the living room, his bottomless midnight eyes trained on the still-running movie sequence. Moving so swiftly that the other two almost missed it, he lashed out with his razor-sharp claws and sank them into the TV, shredding the device into several cleanly-cut strips — and effectively destroying the video console with it.

"Stupid-ass game…" the demon hissed under his breath, his voice several tones deeper than usual as a result of his transformation.

Daxter and Keira glanced from the smoking remains of the television, to the furious Dark creature, and back, their faces identical masks of surprise.

The shorter of the two was, inevitably, the first to break the tense silence.

"Well, that was the worst twenty bucks I've ever spent…"

* * *

**JKA: Daxter's last line there is exactly how I felt after beating that game, in less than a day I might add. Anyway, hope you guys got a chuckle or two out of that, and PLEASE review!**

**Thanks!**


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